The survey has already been posted on the SirsiDynix Horizon and IPAC mailing lists, but it would be great to get more responses from the users of other systems. If anyone is willing to post a link to the survey in a mailing list for any of the other systems, then please do.

I’m planning to close the survey on Saturday 14th April and will post the main results on (or before) April 17th. Quite a bit of the data will be included in the presentation I’m giving at LiS 2007 on the 18th.

The full results from the survey will be published in an informal report sometime around the middle of May. This report will include:

all of the comments from the respondents

tables of the data, broken down by multiple criteria

lots of pretty graphs(!)

conclusions and predictions based on the data

The comments alone currently run to nearly 40 pages and provide a unique insight into our love/hate relationship with the OPAC.

As a taster of things to come, here are some breakdowns taken from the responses to date…

Countries represented

There have been responses from virtually every corner of the globe and the current breakdown is as follows (based on IP address of respondent):

I’ve yet to do a full breakdown of results by all countries, but here are some of the facts for the countries where there have been at least 10 responses:

Canadians are the least happy with their OPACs (4.37 out of 10) whilst the UK is the happiest (5.81 out of 10)

The UK respondents generally think the OPAC features listed in the survey are less important than the rest of the world does

Australians suffer the most from “OPAC envy” with 86% saying they’d experienced it (or perhaps Aussies are the most honest people in the world?)

Respondents from the UK were the least likely to experience envy with just 72% admitting to it

Australians are the most likely to offer OPAC training to their users (81%) and Canadians the least likely (61%)

Library type

As mentioned before, I’ve kicked myself for not asking respondents to say what type of library they are from. However, I added the question to the survey a couple of days ago and nearly 160 respondents have replied since then. The breakdown is:

academic — 92

public — 45

other — 14

school/K12 — 6

It would be great to get some more responses to bump those figures up, but here’s how academic and public libraries compare so far:

publics rate the “people who borrowed this” feature more highly (7.6 out of 10 compared to 6.2 for academics)

…then the current state of play of the 10 OPAC features in the survey (calculated from the number of respondents who said that they had already implemented the feature) is:

Innovators:

OPACs that make personalised suggestions (like Amazon does)

“people who borrowed this” suggestions

Early Adopters:

user supplied tagging

facetted browsing

user supplied comments

user supplied ratings

“did you mean” spelling suggestions

RSS feeds

embedding the OPAC into other places

Early Majority:

enriched content (book covers, etc)

…in other words, only enriched content has jumped “the chasm” into mainstream acceptance.

If we assume that everyone who said that they were planning to implement a feature soon actually does so before the end of 2007, then 3 of the 7 features currently in the Early Adopters group will also have jumped the chasm to reach Early Majority (and mainstream acceptance?) by the start of 2008 — can you guess which 3 they are?

Also, if we continue with that assumption, the 2 features currently in the Innovators group will have moved into the Early Adopters group.

So, if you are craving these “more cowbell” features, it would appear that all of them are taking little baby steps towards an OPAC near you. How long each of them will take to arrive is the next big question and I’ll be offering some informed speculation based on the data once the survey has closed!

I’m giving a short presentation about OPACs at the Library and Information Show in April and I’d be really grateful to any librarians reading this blog post who would be happy to respond to a quick survey about the subject:

On the blog, Dan mentions that the site will provide APIs for getting at the data and I can’t wait to see if we can do anything with that data in our OPAC.

I quietly flicked on the ability to add reviews and comment to our OPAC last week, but we’ve yet to have our first student generated comment. This has slightly surprised me (i.e. made my right eyebrow rise by about 3mm) as we’ve already had several hundred book ratings added in the last few weeks. However, adding a rating doesn’t require you to login but adding a comment does (at the request of our Librarians).

If we don’t get any bites soon, I’ll probably tweak the code to allow anonymous comments. These will need to be fully moderated, as it seems these days that any HTML <form> on a public web page will attract spam 😦

However, it does raise some interesting questions:

Is having to login to post comments too much of a barrier?

Are public library users (e.g. those at AADL) more likely to post comments/reviews than students at an academic library?

If you’ve not come across the term before, an unconference tends to have a general theme (e.g. Library 2.0) but the actual agenda for the event is decided on the day by whoever turns up. In fact, the people who do turn up are the “right” people for that particular event. There may be a small number of pre-planned sessions (e.g. someone talking about how they’ve used a blog in their library), but the idea is very much that you decide what you’d like to learn about and then one (or more) of the delegates volunteers to talk about it.

All attendees are expected to participate in some way — either by giving a short presentation or talk (vaguely relevant to the theme), or by asking questions during the sessions. Once the agenda for the day has been agreed, there will typically be multiple sessions running at the same time and a “two feet” rule applies — if the session you’re in isn’t of interest or isn’t what you thought it would be, you just leave and join one of the other sessions.

As you can imagine, the emphasis is very much on networking, discussion, spontaneity, serendipity, and the sharing of experiences. In fact, in some ways, an unconference emulates the networking that goes outside of the sessions at a formal conference.

So, if there was such a unconference in the UK, would you consider going?

Just for the heck of it, I’ve started logging details of the full bib pages displayed in the OPAC to get a feel for what are the most looked at books. Once we’ve got enough data, it’ll be interesting to cross reference that with the actual number of physical copies we own for each title and whether or not a copy was checked out shortly after it was looked at.

In the meantime, here’s another “wall of books” to feast your eyes on…

I’m finally back home, 15 hours after setting off at an unmentionable hour to travel down to the CILIP event in London today. I’m a creature of habit, and my habit is to wake up gradually at about 6:45am in the morning — getting up at 5am just doesn’t feel right 😀

I’m too knackered to write very much, but a big thank you to everyone involved for giving me the chance to show off some of our OPAC tweaks, and thanks to everyone who chatted to me or took one of my moo cards!

It was also great to finally meet Tim Hodson (Information Takes Over) in the flesh. Isn’t it weird meeting someone you’ve never seen before but whose blog you read on a regular basis? It might just be me, but UK library bloggers rarely seem to include a photograph of themselves. If I was to include a picture of myself, I’d choose this picture (which isn’t of me, but I like to pretend it might be because his name is “Davey” too)…

I thoroughly enjoyed all of the speakers today, but (am I allowed to pick a favourite?) I really really enjoyed Antony Brewerton‘s session — I can’t remember the last time I’ve laughed so much during a presentation!

I’ve uploaded the final version of my presentation to http://webcat.hud.ac.uk/cilip/ and there’s also a few photographs on Flickr (unfortunately I left my rucksack at the front of the room after my session, so I couldn’t take any photographs in the afternoon). If you’ve ever wanted to see what a sunrise over Huddersfield gasworks looks like, then you won’t be disappointed!!!

Well, I finally passed through the “denial” stage yesterday evening (which was partly why I didn’t post the information I knew until the formal announcement), slipped in “anger” overnight (good job I can never remember my nightmares!), which I guess puts me firmly into the “bargaining” stage today…

I wonder if I rang up SirsiDynix and promised to be a nicer person or told them how much I love them, they might reconsider?

I guess either is better than still being in the “anger” stage — 15 minutes of me on the stage shaking my fists at the heavens screaming “Why God? Why?!? Horizon 8.0 looked so beautiful with its funky Aqua style buttons! Take me instead!!! Wait a minute… Statue of Liberty? …that was our planet! You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! Damn you all to hell!” might well go down as a memorable presentation, but not in a “good” way.

Anyway, if nothing else, the upcoming European Conference in May is going to be extremely interesting — if you haven’t done so already, get your space booked now!